


the pedal's pressed, but nothing works

by nuricurry



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse), Resident Evil - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Introspection, Many liberties taken with Leon's backstory, Slow Build, Trans Male Character, headcanon heavy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-29
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2020-03-26 17:47:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19010755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nuricurry/pseuds/nuricurry
Summary: He grew up in a two bedroom trailer off the highway, the youngest of four because his mother was a good Catholic woman. His life just seemed to be a series of long, complicated stories, all strung together.





	1. driving with the rear view mirror

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gravy_tape](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gravy_tape/gifts).



> This is somewhat of a labor of love. It's a long-winded exploration into Leon's character, with quite a bit of personal opinions and headcanons thrown in. Canon-compliant, but plenty of added detail for flavor is the best way to describe this I think.

He grew up in a two-bedroom trailer off the highway, in a park that smelled of diesel fuel and wet newspaper. He was the youngest of four because his mother was a good Catholic woman and God told her to be fruitful so she did her best to multiply, even though it was difficult at times to keep food on the table. She just kept praying, and taking extra shifts at the diner, while his dad kept telling them that his promotion at the mines was coming any day now (it never did). Everything he owned came from his brothers, which meant it all had been passed through at least three sets of hands before him, from the repurposed detergent bucket full of Legos to the tattered jeans that Sammy stretched out around the waist. 

He remembered hearing his mother crying about that once, late at night when he was supposed to be in bed. She and his father slept on a pullout couch in the living room, while the two bedrooms were split between their children, and he had been going to the bathroom when the sound of his mother’s weeping caused him to stop and listen in. The light above the kitchen table was on, and his parents were seated beneath it, piles of paper and a stack of bills laid out on the tabletop. 

“I can’t even buy my baby a pair of those jelly shoes,” she whimpered into the hands she held against her face. His dad had one of his on her shoulder, and he was rubbing it gently. “Dentist says Teddy needs braces. We aren’t gonna afford Christmas presents this year!” 

He walked back to his room, bathroom forgotten, and got back into bed, looking up at the underside of the top bunk above his head. Headlights from the constant passing of trucks bleed through the blinds and danced across the wall before fading, and he remembered not getting much sleep that night. 

Things got a little better when Nick turned sixteen and was able to get a job (and demanded that his siblings stop calling him Nicky, but of course they never listened). Then, when he moved out at seventeen to live with his girlfriend and her family, things were better still. Regardless of those minor improvements, his brother always passed along a few crumpled ten dollar bills to Leon whenever he’d stop over because their mom refused any money he tried to hand her way. He even covered the cost of Leon’s stitches from when he split his eyebrow open while playing in the dumpster behind the local 7-11. 

That was another thing that his family was always dealing with; Leon getting himself into trouble.

Leon wasn’t like his brother Sam who liked to pick fights because he thought he had something to prove. He wasn’t even the sort of kid who naturally attracted bullies. He was well liked in school, and he had plenty of friends, but Leon was what his mother lovingly referred to as _‘pure-hearted’_ and Teddy called _‘goddamn stupid’_. Leon charged into things without thinking a lot of the time, he was both nosy and good-natured and that left him with a lot of confidence to put himself into situations where he probably shouldn’t be. 

Tabitha Brown lived three trailers down from the Kennedys his whole life. She was two years older than him and had he remembered thinking her freckles were cute and he liked the way she laughed. She got a bike for Christmas one year, but the chain kept coming loose and she never knew how to fix it. Usually, her dad would put it back on, or Nicky if he happened to stop by, but one time Leon decided to do it himself, certain he could reattach it after having watched his brother do it a half dozen times. Twenty minutes later, Tabitha had to run and get her mom to tell her that Leon’s hair was caught in the chainring and they couldn’t get it out. Mrs. Brown had to cut it, and when his mom got home from work that night, he had to explain what had happened to her three times before she stopped crying at the sight of his mangled hair. After that, he was put on a chair in the middle of the kitchen with a sheet tied around his neck so his mom could pull out the scissors and try to fix what she could. With three brothers before him, all she knew how to do was cut his hair in that same short style, but Leon didn’t mind that at all. It suited him better, he thought. Though, eventually, by middle school, he agreed to let it grow it out to his shoulders because his mom asked and he had a hard time ever telling her no to anything. 

The majority of the time Leon spent with his father was while holding a gun. His father hunted deer so that they could eat, like a lot of people in rural West Virginia, and if he wasn’t working or sleeping, he was out in the woods, finding them some meat to get them through the winter. His mother had been reluctant to let him go, the first few times, because he was her baby, and wasn’t he too delicate, too gentle for something as rough as that? But his father didn’t give it a second thought-- he just pushed the rifle into Leon’s hands and taught him how to load and release the safety on the weapon, before pulling on his coat and heading outside, knowing that Leon would follow him. A lot of his Saturdays growing up were spent lying on his stomach up in a deer stand, focusing on the fog of his breath, until his dad would nudge him with his foot and he’d snap to attention, looking for their prize. 

They didn’t talk during those hours. His father was never much for talking, most of his vocalizations tapping out under five words, but Leon didn’t mind, because he just liked that his dad wanted to bring him along. He liked that his dad felt like he belonged there, right there next to him, the same as all his brothers. The only time they talked was the time they went out after Teddy got accepted to WVU, and his dad asked him if he planned to go to college. 

At that point, Leon was fourteen and his biggest fear was Brittany from Pre-Algebra finding out he had a crush on her. High school was still a year away and anything after that much further, and he couldn’t see anything for himself beyond the English homework he still hadn’t finished and the basketball game Marcus invited him to next week. He knew why his father was asking; his father wanted to know if he had to disappoint Leon with the news that if he wanted to go to school, he’d have to take out thirty years of student loans, or hope his grades improved enough to qualify for a scholarship. He already heard his parents have that conversation with Teddy, heard his mother’s embarrassed sniffling, his brother’s gentle reassurances that he didn’t mind, and that she had nothing to be sorry for. 

He told his dad he didn’t think college was for him and said he’d probably pick up a trade school, or maybe look into something at the Walmart if nothing came to him. 

“Maybe I’ll work in the mines,” he proposed, half as a joke, and half sincere, thinking that his dad might be pleased by that, might be happy at the thought of one of his kids wanting to work at the same place he did. 

“No, not the mines,” his father immediately shot down the idea, the frown so deep set in his face it furrowed lines into his forehead, “You stay away from them. You deserve better than the mines. You’re too smart for that.” 

Leon had never considered his father a stupid man, and so that comment of his stuck with him for years after-- he wondered if he was being praised, or if his father was being insulted.

He had his Confirmation at fifteen. His gift wasn’t new church clothes like it had been for his brothers, but his mother did pass down her pearl rosary, the one he had seen her turning and sliding between her fingers for over the past decade. He wore it around his neck, always tucked carefully beneath his shirt, the crucifix dangling in the center of his chest. It swung sometimes in a slow, almost soothing rhythm, thumping against the spot over his heart. He found himself at times copying his mother’s habit, taking off the beads and running his fingers over each of them, going through the decades of prayers without thinking about it. Catholicism was bred into his genes, it colored even the most subconscious of his movements, and Leon never quite decided how he felt about that. His mother, on the other hand, just seemed happy to see him keeping the rosary so close. 

“It’s been in the family for years,” she told him, “My grandma gave it to my mom, and my mom gave it to me. Now, I’m giving it to you.” 

The implication there wasn’t one Leon liked, even though he never said as much-- the implication that his mom expected him to grow up, get married, and have kids of his own to pass it along to. The implication that she was relying on him to carry on the tradition. It felt too stifling, too much like someone pouring a bottle of water down his throat. Not something that would necessarily kill him, but something that made him uncomfortable, something that made him want to throw up and crawl under his covers and never come out. His mom expected a lot of things from him, and sometimes he wished he knew how to give them to her, without feeling like he had to lose himself in the process. When it was things like passing his classes, or going to mass on Sunday, and Catechism on Wednesday, he could manage that. When it was helping her out with cooking dinner, or doing the laundry, or riding his bike down to the Kroger to pick up milk and bread, he could do that. But getting married, and having kids, while maybe waiting tables at the diner or doing shifts at the Walmart, wasn’t something he felt he could ever do. He loved his mother, but he couldn’t see himself following in her footsteps. 

(Maybe if he had, he wouldn’t have ended up so messed up later on.) 

He joined the track team in his junior year of high school. It was the cheapest sport he could join, and with just him and Sammy-- who had graduated two years before-- living at home, his parents were able to afford the fees and uniform and costs to travel to meets and competitions. Or, at least they afforded half of them; Leon got a part-time job delivering papers in the morning on his bike and didn’t tell his dad the true amount of what everything cost, covering the rest with his wages. He just didn’t want his dad to have to worry about it so much, and he wanted his mom to be able to afford to do things like get gas before the car was empty and slowly start paying back years of debt. 

He remembered when his mom’s car had been repossessed the Christmas before he turned seventeen, and how she started getting rides to work with his dad, dropping him off at the mines before heading to the diner and working her shift. The diner wasn’t far from the high school, so she had Leon go pick him up after five, while she moved on to her second job at the drugstore. Not telling them how much it cost to be on the track team was just another way to ease their burden, and he thought nothing of it, having long since turned that inclination into instinct, a subconscious choice he did without much thought. 

Running was a good fit for him because he didn’t have to think about it. He didn’t have to plan out strategies that would get the upper hand over other competitors, he didn’t have to be physically stronger than them, or specially trained. He just had to be fast, and years of running away from lit firecrackers and hornet nests that he’d accidentally disturbed gave him plenty of practice in that regard. 

The best part of running was weightlessness he felt, the single-minded direction of his movements and the ability to disconnect from everything else, and just feel the wind as it whipped across his face. It was almost a high, the feeling he got from running. Plenty of people had told him about it before; he knew about that rush of adrenaline and how addictive it could be. But for him, it was something else. It was being free from his own consciousness, his own body, for those few precious moments. It was thirty seconds, but to him, it felt like hours of being pulled away from reality, and put in a place where the only thing that mattered was the slap of his feet on the track, air rushing in and out of his lungs, and the pump of blood coursing through his veins. Running was the closest he ever felt to serenity, and it wasn’t difficult to see why he got sort of addicted to it. He did his paper route on his bike in the morning and then ran for five miles at night. On weekends he’d go up to the quarry and do laps around its rim until he was drenched in sweat and covered in dust. He went through three pairs of shoes the summer before senior year, and so he went back to taking hand-me-downs from his brothers, to offset the costs. 

His last track meet of high school earned him third place in the state of West Virginia for the 800 meter dash. He didn’t consider going to regionals; his dad had encouraged him, and so had his brothers, but he was done with track, once he heard he wasn’t eligible for any of the scholarships. They only had two available in his division, and both went to the ones in first and second place. It wasn’t really bitterness or jealousy; he just was tired of doing track and knew he wasn’t going to go to college for it, so he stopped worrying about the money and the practice and the pressure, and just focused on getting up his grade in English so he didn’t flunk his last term. 

He graduated thirtieth in a class of one-hundred, and his mom took the morning off of work and his brothers all sat in the bleachers, hooting and hollering when his name was called to get his diploma. His dad wasn’t there; he had to work, but when he got home that night, picked up by Teddy on his way to the trailer, he came in with a cake, and a card signed by all the guys he worked with in the mines. The miners had pooled their money and Leon was given fifty dollars, which he used half to put gas in the car, despite his mother’s protests. 

The rest went to asking out Madelyn Cooper on a date to the bowling alley. 

He didn’t call it a date, and she clearly didn’t think of it as one. She watched him play Frogger for a few rounds in the arcade while they waited for a lane to open up, and when Leon would move up close to her, so he could put his hands over hers in order to direct her how to hold the ball, or he’d nudge her feet with his own to fix her position, she always just laughed. They shared a basket of cheese fries and he even splurged with getting them a large ice cream sundae, doing everything he thought was right to show her that this was supposed to be a date. When he walked her home that night and stood on her front porch while she unlocked her door, he leaned into her, but Madelyn interpreted the gesture as him looking for a hug, which was all she gave him, before bidding him goodnight, and retreating inside. It was during the three-mile walk to his own home that Leon realized that he wasn’t a boy she’d see herself dating; he was just her friend, a kid she’d known since fourth grade. That’s all people in his hometown would ever see him as; the kid he had been growing up, but not the man he was turning into. 

That night signified the start of Leon’s efforts to get out of Buckhannon and start new someplace where no one knew who he was. 

The summer after high school he worked thirty-six hours a week at the local gas station. He only got the job because he was willing to take fifty cents less than minimum wage and he didn’t have kids who he needed to find a babysitter for. Plus, he happened to be decent at lifting boxes full of cheap beer into the cooler. While at the gas station, he dealt with people who yelled at him for not having fresh coffee first thing in the morning on their way to work, and fielded crude comments and unwelcome grabs at his hair and his ass from truckers who were hoping for some tail from a kid who only the month before was able to register to vote. For his efforts, and after taxes, he was awarded just over one thousand dollars. Most of it went to fixing up his car and getting a haircut that made his mother cry all over again. But, two-hundred of it went into changing his name. 

His mom, all things considered, took it fairly well. Her only request was that she got to help pick out his new name. “Just like I picked out your first one,” she said, only a little bit sad, and he felt it wasn’t unfair of her to ask, so he ultimately agreed. That’s how ‘Leon’ came about; a great-uncle, or maybe a second cousin, they weren’t quite sure, but it was on the family tree, and he liked it, so Leon it was. Kennedy stayed, because he’d always been one of those, obvious from the muddled, dirty blonde color of his hair, just like his father’s, and just like his brothers’. His cleft chin was another indicator, though his hadn’t been as strong as the rest of them, and his mom’s petite frame had softened him up some, but not enough where the rest wasn’t clear pure, red-blooded, West Virginian Kennedy. He sent in the paperwork, and two months later got a new birth certificate, emblazoned with his new name. 

_Leon S. Kennedy_

The night he knew his new name was official, his family all had dinner at Nicky’s house. He was married by then and expecting his first baby with the same girl he’d been with since high school.

“You kept your middle name?” Sammy laughed at him as he was passed the plate of biscuits, “Why the hell would you do that? Why not change the whole thing?”

“I couldn’t pay for it twice. You know, I paid for the one that matters. Maybe I’ll change it later,” Leon explained, which made Sammy laugh louder, and even his other brothers and his mother snickered. “What?” he asked, looking between them.

“You don’t have to pay for each name,” his father said, taking pity on him, more than anyone else gathered around the table, “You could have changed it all at once.”

Leon felt his face heat and turn red, while Sammy choked on a mouthful of roast from laughing so hard.


	2. it's hard to know where we should go

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> His mother was terrified of him leaving home, leaving West Virginia, and never coming back. She feared that in all of her children. His mom was afraid of all of her children moving on, moving away, but it seemed like with Leon, she held on the tightest.

He told his mom he was changing his name before he told her anything else. That seemed to scare her for some reason because he remembered how she began to panic, and she kept asking him over and over again why he wanted to change it. 

“Are you leaving? Are you leaving?”

His mother was terrified of him leaving home, leaving West Virginia, and never coming back. She feared that in all of her children. He remembered Teddy telling her about his application to Ohio State. When his brother mentioned the soccer program and the engineering department, she began to cry. He remembered Nicky mentioning that there was more mechanic work in Pennsylvania and the pay was better too. She locked the two of them in the trailer’s three-foot bathroom and begged him for over two hours to stay. His mom was afraid of all of her children moving on, moving away, but it seemed like with Leon, she held on the tightest.

He wondered if it was because he was her youngest. Or if it was because she had to bury three other babies before he came along and because she had wiped up more of his blood off her kitchen counter than all of his brothers’ combined. 

His mother told him while the two of them sat in the car in the parking lot of the county courthouse about how she feared that if he changed his name, that meant he was going to leave, and never come back. She seemed almost relieved when he told her the real reason he wanted to change it. She would call him whatever he asked, so long as she could still keep hold of him, so long as he never left to a place beyond her reach.

If he was guilty of any sin, it was for breaking his mother’s heart. 

He had always loved superheroes as a kid. He used to borrow Sammy’s comic books (though Sammy always called it ‘stealing’ and then punched Leon in the arm over it) and read them over and over again, carrying them from the bedroom to the dinner table to the bathroom, pouring over each panel, each frame of daring rescues and moral quandaries. 

He liked the stories best where the hero was someone simple, someone unassuming who ended up being given powers that changed their life. 

(It was possible that he was projecting a little.) 

Maybe what drew him to those stores was that he had grown up dreaming of the day where a magic sword or a miracle pill could change him into someone else, maybe it was that all he wanted was some miracle that could turn him into the person he always felt he should be, and maybe he just liked to root for the underdog. Maybe it was a lot of things. 

That’s what made him decide to sign up for the police academy after high school. Until someone gave him the secret word or scientists developed the ‘superhero’ serum, being a police officer was the closest he was ever going to get. 

He wore Sammy’s WVU Tech sweater the day he was dropped off at the barracks. His dad slapped him on the back while his mom sat in the car crying woefully as Shania Twain filtered through the radio. It was almost like some weird dream where the pieces tried to fit together, but weren’t quite right, almost as if they’d been cut from different pictures and pasted together. 

“Mom, it’s gonna be okay,” he tried to soothe her through the rolled-down car window. His mother wasn’t looking at him, too busy staring out of the windshield while tears left wet tracks down her face. Leaning into the car, he gave her a gentle peck on her freckled cheek, before pulling back and stepping away. “I’ll call you soon, okay? It’ll be fine Mom.” 

His father handed him his duffel bag and then gave him a last, lingering hug, before returning to the driver’s side of the car. As his parents pulled away from the curb, Leon waved at both of them until they turned the corner further up the road and were no longer in his sight. 

Leon was a mama’s boy, and the sight of her tears would always remain with him. It hurt to see her cry, and it hurt to know he was the reason why she was crying. But what hurt the most was the phone call that he had that night, the phone call he gave to make sure that his parents had gotten home safe, the last phone call he could give them for a week while he went through orientation at the academy.

“Chrissy,” his father called for his mother on the other end of the line, “Leon’s on the phone. He wants to talk to you.” 

“I can’t,” he heard his mother say, her voice small and distant but clearly still laced with tears, “I can’t talk to him. It’ll kill me.”

His father didn’t push the issue, and neither did Leon. They just shared a few more pleasantries, a short exchange of ‘I love you’s, and then his father hung up the phone, and Leon was left holding onto a payphone in the lobby of the barracks wearing his brother’s old gym clothes. 

Leon was 20, and for the first time in his life, he was completely on his own. 

Like most twenty-somethings who no longer were beholden to their parents' rule, Leon spent the first two weeks at the academy eating Twinkies between meals, staying up past midnight, and forgetting to brush his teeth. The time went by without incident at the academy. He was well-liked, though a far cry from expected, often teased for being young, and naive, and ‘mountain folk’, but none of those jibes wasn’t anything he hadn’t gotten before. The ribbing was good-natured (he believed) and the jokes at his expense weren’t personal (he hoped), and he managed to make a few decent friends, and even got a letter of recommendation from one of the officers. 

“You’re a good kid, Kennedy,” he heard a lot while in the academy, “Reckless. Maybe a little simple, but you’ve got a good heart.” 

Yeah, his mom used to tell him that too. He knew he was being called stupid, but he still graduated, and that’s what mattered.

He applied to Charleston. He applied to Morgantown. He applied to Fairmont. He applied to every police station in the state of West Virginia, and only one of them ever replied.

“Raccoon City?” his brother had squawked out his disbelief over the crackling static of the payphone, “Why don’t you go live in a dumpster? There’s probably more interesting things happening there.” 

“I like Raccoon,” Leon said, a little indignantly, his voice cracking on the last syllable, “It’s got plenty of going on! They just put in a Discovery Zone!”

Little did he know at the time that a cheap dinner arcade was the least interesting thing happening in Raccoon City. But that revealed itself later. At that time all he knew about Raccoon City was that it was bigger than where he grew up, it had more than one gas station, more than one stoplight, there wasn’t a cloud of ash from coal mines hovering over it. People didn’t know him in Raccoon City, he could show up and be whoever he wanted and no one would be any the wiser. Not like back home.

He wasn’t ashamed of where he grew up (well, maybe he was, maybe a little) but he didn’t want to be stuck there. He didn’t want to live like Mr. Coop from two trailers down who died on a Thursday and wasn’t found until Saturday because everyone was so used to him being holed up on his recliner anyway. He didn’t want to live like his brother Nicky who worked at the car shop at day and delivered pizza at night to make ends meet because Danielle was pregnant again and there was soon going to be another mouth to feed. He didn’t want to live like Leslie from eighth-grade algebra who ran into him after he came home from the academy while buying milk at the 7-11. Her hair was frizzy and bleached and she smelled like cheap cigarettes and when he told her about getting job offers in Pennsylvania and Delaware, she told him about how she was saving up all her pocket change so that maybe in five years she and her husband could afford to go to Dollywood. Brittany was the smartest girl in his year, she got valedictorian, but she also got married and pregnant right out of high school and Leon sensed that the furthest she was going to get away from home was the state park down the interstate. People who stayed in town got stuck there, like tires spinning in a pit of mud. Leon knew he had to get out of there, he knew that if he stayed, he’d be bogged down and that’d be the end. 

The hardest part of his decision to leave home was telling his mother. 

He called his mom the night before he headed to Raccoon. “It’s not far. I can drive down to see you and Daddy on the weekends,” he tried reasoning with her because despite his promise to stay in the state of West Virginia, his mother still cried that he was going to leave her. “Ma, please,” he begged because she wasn’t as weepy as she had been a week ago but he still heard her sniffing through the receiver.

“You swore to me, baby,” his mother pressed him, her voice firm even as she hiccuped, “You swore you wouldn’t leave me.” 

“Ma, I’m only an hour away. Daddy drives half that for work,” he argued, tired and exasperated.

“Then why can’t you just live here?” she asked him. That was a question that Leon didn’t have an answer to that wouldn’t kill her.

“I have to go Ma,” he finally told her, “I’ll call you this weekend.” 

“I love you, Leon,” he heard his mother start to say but he was already hanging up.

That was the last time he ever spoke to her.


End file.
